Review: My Father at 100, Ron Reagan’s new memoir

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Ronald Reagan, an anniversary that has spawned special events around the country, including a special exhibit at the National Archives, a massive expansion of Reagan’s library in California, a stamp in his honor and even a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade.

As part of the celebration, Ron Reagan, the president’s youngest son, has made his own contribution. While others will remember the Great Communicator and the Gipper, he gives us Reagan Unplugged, or more properly, Dutch, as he was known growing up.

My Father at 100 is not a comprehensive biography. While its revelations about Reagan’s battle with Alzheimer’s have made headlines, this is not the focus of the book. Rather, it is a book about a son, lovingly but not uncritically trying to know his sometimes distant dad.

In his most acclaimed role in the movie King’s Row, Reagan, upon waking to find his legs have been amputated, utters the line “Where is the rest of me?” The line became the title for Reagan’s 1965 autobiography, which marked his transition from acting to politics. Ron Reagan’s book could have been called Where Is the Rest of Him? Despite Ronald Reagan’s fame and ease around people, his son argues that he was basically a loner and hid much of his inner self from others. This new book is an attempt to break through his late father’s defenses.

While, by his own admission, he largely fails in this, Ron Reagan does give us some fascinating glimpses of what made his dad tick.

The focus of the book is Ronald Reagan’s youth. His son traces the immigration of the Reagan clan first to New York, then to Chicago, then to a series of towns in Illinois, including Tampico — where Reagan was born on Feb. 6, 1911 — and later Dixon, where the family eventually settled.

In building the family portrait, there is a focus on Reagan’s parents, Jack and Nelle. Jack was a salesman whose drinking problem and inability to hold a job forced the family to make frequent moves. Nelle was a pious member of the Disciples of Christ. It was a home in which there were frequent arguments. Ron Reagan believes that the frequent bickering led his dad to develop a defense mechanism that caused him to avoid conflict in his personal life. This, coupled with his winning personality, may explain how Reagan could frequently cross swords with someone like Tip O’Neill, yet remain friendly, if not friends.

Bernie Boston/Los Angeles Times

President Ronald Reagan and President-elect George Bush with Mikhail Gorbachev on New York’s Governors Island in December 1988.

The son also notes his dad’s tendency to idealize — edit is the term he uses.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ronald Reagan’s view of Dixon, where he was lionized as a young man for his work as a lifeguard, saving 77 lives. The younger Reagan argues that Dixon became the template for his father’s vision of what America is and could be, “a shining city on a hill.”

But Ron Reagan skillfully takes one of his father’s favorite stories to dull the sheen on Dixon. Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Eureka College football team stopped for the night in Dixon during a road trip. Their hotel had plenty of rooms for everyone except the two African-American members of the team. An embarrassed Reagan offered to take the two teammates home with him while the rest of the team stayed at the hotel. Reagan saw the story as an example of how brotherhood could solve problems. The son sees it as evidence of Dixon’s racism.

A delicious irony is his account of how Reagan, who as governor of California was so tough on student protesters, led a student protest against planned cutbacks at Eureka. He delivered a fiery speech denouncing the administration, his first political address.

Ron Reagan saves the most noteworthy material for last, talking about the two great personal crises in his father’s life: the attempted assassination in 1981 and his descent into Alzheimer’s.

The author recounts how upset he was as a child watching his father shot in a Western, and how that feeling came back when he learned of the attempt on the president’s life.

Finally, Ron Reagan raises the curtain on his father’s Alzheimer’s. As early as the 1984 campaign, he was concerned that something was wrong with his dad, citing Reagan’s woeful performance in the first presidential debate with Walter Mondale. But Reagan came out strong in the second debate and delivered a knockout punch. Ron Reagan believes the ebb and flow of early stages of the disease accounts for the highs and lows of his second term, which included both the Iran-contra scandal and his challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin.

In July 1989, Reagan was thrown from a horse and suffered a head injury that required surgeons to open his skull to relieve pressure. They found signs that indicated Alzheimer’s. An examination at the Mayo Clinic confirmed the diagnosis. Reagan, however, was not told until 1994, when the symptoms were obvious. True to form, the son tells us, Reagan was a calm patient, not prone to the outbursts that are common among Alzheimer’s victims.

In the end there is a gentle and moving account of the Gipper’s final moments in 2004.

Part memoir and part family research project, My Father at 100 does not unpack all of Ronald Reagan’s secrets. But Ron Regan has given us some valuable insights. He has given us Dutch.